Case Study: How We Gained More than 100 Links for a Travel Website via Content&nbspMarketing

This post was promoted from YouMoz. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

Many small businesses see content marketing as something that you can only be successful with if you are a huge company with a big budget. I was in the same boat for a long time, but after much research, many (many) failed attempts, and a lot of perseverance, I’ve finally started to see some predictability in how to get results from content marketing. Nothing illustrates this better than a project we managed for a travel company that was inspired by the finale to the fifth season of the television series Game of Thrones.

To sum up how effective this effort was, let me break down the results:

111 linking domains acquired (and counting)

19 linking domains on sites with DA of 70+

33 linking domains on sites with DA of 50+

12 all-time-high days of traffic

Referral traffic was 245 percent higher than the previous year

Coverage in The Washington Post, Business Insider, Mashable, Yahoo, Bored Panda and other top-tier publications.

This was done very simply by creating a map showing all the filming locations used throughout the Game of Thrones series and then promoting it in the right place at the right time. You can see below how this impacted referral traffic to the site:

Before I get into the nitty gritty of the exact process we went through to gain these results, I want to highlight the turning point for me when I truly believed I could make a content marketing approach work. My epiphany came courtesy of Ryan Holiday, who helped me realize there were hundreds of hugely powerful media sites out there desperate for content.

The idea

The very first thing you have to come up with is an idea good enough to gain some traction. Don’t think this needs to be directly connected to your (or your client’s) brand. Even a loose connection is sufficient, as you’ll gain the links and brand mentions when you are referenced as the source of the content. Obviously a closer connection to your offering is better, but if you wait around until you found something sufficiently linked to your product/service in the news, then you might be waiting a long time.

For our example, the company focused on Moroccan holidays since Morocco was used as a filming location in Game of Thrones.

I find the best way to get ideas is by surfing the web, particularly the bigger news and entertainment websites (e.g., Mashable, Buzzfeed, Bored Panda etc). Buzzsumo is also an excellent tool for finding similar kinds of successful content in your niche.

Identify targets

Once you have an idea, the next job is to find the people you will target with your outreach when the content is ready. It’s crucial to do this before you create the content, as this process may highlight particular elements your targets are receptive to, which you can then incorporate to make it more appealing to them. For example, you may find that some publications enjoy featuring maps, while others prefer stats and surveys.

The key is to find specific people who have written about something similar to your topic before. We sifted through hundreds of sites to find the specific journalists and writers who had written pieces around Game of Thrones so we knew they had an interest in it and were more likely to be receptive when it came to the outreach process.

Another way to do this is to find a similar piece of content that has been successful and has gained a lot of coverage, then use a tool like Open Site Explorer to examine which websites and authors have linked to it. We found this Google Maps version of Westeros, for example, which we used to mine potential targets for outreach.

The golden nugget in this kind of scenario is identifying the sites which other sites use as as sources for their information. If you can get your content featured in those places, it is almost a guarantee that you will see it republished on a variety of other powerful sites. For example, Business Insider articles are republished on Yahoo, and we’ve found that a story will often get picked up in a lot of places if you can seed it there originally. Therefore, offering your content as an exclusive to those kinds of sites can be a great approach to follow.

Pre-outreach

One possible addition at this stage, depending on the kind of content you’re producing, would be to send an initial feeler email to one or two of your key targets to gauge their interest in the piece. (Hat tip to Brian Dean of Backlinko for this tip.) This can be a great way of getting on your target's radar without being pushy.

"Hi John: We’re currently putting together a comprehensive map which features every single Game of Thrones filming location. Obviously, excitement is at fever pitch ahead of the season finale next week. I saw you’d covered GOT earlier this year, so I thought I’d see if it was something you’d be interested in featuring?

If so, let me know, and I’ll send it over when it’s ready to go."

Be sure to let them know why it’s newsworthy and why it’s relevant to them.

If you receive a reply, that’s great. But the real goal is to create familiarity for when your content is ready for sharing.

Once you have a great idea and have identified the people you are going to target with outreach, it’s now time to produce your content.

You don’t need to have huge budgets to create great-looking graphics and interesting images. Websites like Fiverr and Upwork are fantastic resources for finding freelancers who do great work. It simply takes a bit of initial time to sift through and separate the wheat from the chaff. Once that’s done, give the freelancers a detailed brief and tell them exactly what you want.

There are a wide variety of different types of content you could create in this way, including infographics, maps, charts, graphs, slideshows, interactive graphics, and videos. If your idea is interesting and newsworthy enough, then packaging it up in any one of these formats should give you a great opportunity to gain coverage.

Another useful point to consider, in this stage and the "ideas" one, is that the wider the audience you can cover with your content, the more likely you are to get it featured in lots of places. If your content is relevant to people in the US, UK, and around the world, then any site on the Internet may write about it. Limit it to a study about the UK and US, though, and sites are unlikely to pick it up. Fortunately, pretty much everyone on the globe now loves Game of Thrones.

Given that our idea centered on filming locations in Game of Thrones, it made sense to structure the content in a map format. We added in some nice images of each place and gave it a GOT feel and we were good to go!

Contact your exclusive target

Once your content is ready to go, contact your outreach targets and tell them about the content. Provide a concise summary of what you have and why it's valuable to them. The key here is to offer it as an exclusive feature for that site before reaching out to anyone else. If the writer sees an opportunity to win those clicks before any other site features it, then they're more likely to pounce on your offer.

If they aren’t interested and don’t reply, though, move on until you find one or more takers. Remember, you only need one solid placement to be successful.

Promote, promote, promote!

Immediately after getting our content featured, we begin the process of promoting it. The more we help the post perform well, the more likely it is that other people will pick it up.

Do everything you can to get more visibility for that post: Share it on your social networks, hijack hashtags, add it to a relevant sub-reddit on Reddit, ask friends to share it, etc.

Boost the post with ads on Facebook and Twitter to enhance its visibility and give it the best possible chance of getting as much social proof as possible. It may seem counter-intuitive to spend money promoting someone else’s site, but the benefit you’ll get from the additional social proof will be well worth it.

Another benefit of this is that many of these sites promote the most popular content they publish to their homepage feeds. If you can get enough early buzz around your piece, then it will only enhance its visibility further by pushing it onto the homepage.

Once you have your exclusive feature in place, the next action is to publish it on your own site.

When you add it to your site, ensure that you add plenty of additional information to it. Make sure that your enhanced version is better than the original piece of content.

Ride the wave

So, you’ve got your first piece of exclusive content placed, promoted it like crazy so that it has irresistible social signals, and published an enhanced (i.e., new) version of it on your site. Now it’s time for the second wave of outreach. Return to your list of highly relevant targets and start contacting them. The only difference this time is that you are not offering exclusive content. Instead, you are pointing them to the exclusive and highlighting how much people are loving it — and how much success (and clicks) they could have a share of if they published the content on their own site.

“Hi Joan: In collaboration with Lawrence of Morocco, we've created a map featuring every real life location used through the series Game of Thrones that I thought you might like. Would you be interested in featuring it on Bored Panda?Obviously, anticipation and interest is building around the upcoming finale of Season 5, as well as their recent announcements about locations for Season 6, so it's a bit of a hot topic at the moment. Plus, everyone loves GOT!The map has already received some really great feedback since being featured on Business Insider (http://uk.businessinsider.com/game-of-thrones-set-...), and has taken off on social media since we published it on the LOM site - http://www.lawrenceofmorocco.com/news/game-of-thro....

I've attached the map here for you to take a look. If you publish it, if you could link to lawrenceofmorocco.com as the source, that'd be great. If you need anything else, just let me know.

Hope you like it!"

Keep digging

Now is the time to work down your list and contact those third-tier sites to ask about featuring your content. They might not be the strongest sites on the web individually, but provide great value collectively.

For us, this effort involved us contacting the self-proclaimed "nerd sites" (i.e., sites that cater to fans of comics, video games, and cosplay). Our third effort at outreach successfully targeted these groups. As a result, we gained links on Unreality Mag (DA of 57) and Nerdist (DA of 80), among others.

Once the dust has settled and you’re sitting back all pleased with yourself, remember that there are still things you can do to make the job easier next time.

Follow up with the sites that used your content to thank them for featuring it, comment on how well it did (in case they didn’t realize that themselves), and ask them if they’d be happy to receive more ideas from you in the future.

One other thing you can do is to make a note in your calendar of future dates when your content may be relevant again. For us, we’re ready to go when the next Game of Thrones season approaches. That's when we’ll start reaching out to a new batch of sites, possibly with an updated map.

Final thoughts

I bought into the idea and benefits of content marketing a long time ago, but struggled to put the recommendations I'd read about into practical action to gain (relatively) consistent and predictable results for a long time.

Hopefully, this post will help you, too, to take the plunge and find success.

Do share your own experiences and difficulties with content marketing in the comments below, along with any questions.

About tommcloughlin —
Tom runs SEO Travel, a specialist agency for travel companies offering SEO, content marketing and social media consultancy. He's also put together a free video course to help small travel companies improve their own online marketing.

With all due respect, this is an example of a great publicity campaign and not "content marketing." This was the process you followed:

1. Come up with a creative idea2. Create a media list3. Create the creatives and marketing collateral4. Pitch your target outlets to write about it

That's what publicists did long before the Internet ever existed, and it's why "content marketing" does not really exist as a new thing unto itself. It's the same old thing -- just repackaged into a new buzzword.

As this great example shows, links are just by-products of good publicity campaigns. Marketers need to stop thinking about "getting links" and start thinking about how to get publicity -- in other words, how to get reporters, writers, bloggers, and people in general to talk about them online. The "earned" links will come by themselves as natural results.

I agree, the key principles here are taken from very traditional methods that were taking place long before we were worrying about links and Likes. However, the internet has hugely increased the demand for content with such a massive amount of publishers now out there, all on the lookout for the silver bullet which will go viral, gain millions of pageviews and increase the ad spend they can bring in. As marketers this presents a huge opportunity and in my experience I've found there are particular types of ideas that gain more traction in getting shared and proliferated on multiple sites, namely those which include a physical piece of content for them to feature.

For me, the 'content' differentiation is important as things like infographics and video in particular are extremely shareable and it is easy for one website to see the content on another publication and take it for themselves (and include attribution/links to the initial source). This physical piece of content makes the process I highlighted in the case study much more successful in terms of shareability and attracting links, as opposed to a less tangible 'idea' that might be used in a more traditional PR or publicity campaign which has more focus offline. I often see great PR campaigns from travel companies which yield zero links.

I do agree to a certain extent with your 'earned links will come' point, but as highlighted above I feel the 'content' element of this work makes the link acquisition side of things more effective. I also wanted to put a bit more of an emphasis on the links element of the results here as I know the SEO community can get rather excitable about a nice link or two, and I thought the Moz community would particularly enjoy that side of the story. Obviously there are a huge range of other benefits, such as increased brand visibility, referral traffic, improved search rankings and much more as Rand explained recently in an excellent Whiteboard Friday.

Whether we call it content marketing, PR, link building or anything else (aren't they all merging into one and the same thing?), I hope the post highlighted some specific actions which people can replicate to gain some success from this kind of activity as it is certainly yielding some great results for the campaigns we've been working on.

As marketers this presents a huge opportunity and in my experience I've found there are particular types of ideas that gain more traction in getting shared and proliferated on multiple sites

Well, yeah. Just like there are particular types of advertisements that get millions of people talking about them with their coworkers the next day. Just like there are particular types of creative publicity campaigns that impress millions and get people to talk about them with their family and friends.

I still fail to see how "content marketing" is anything new. All that has changed is that we have an additional set of communications channels over which the creative and marketing collateral can spread -- it's called the Internet.

For me, the 'content' differentiation is important as things like infographics and video in particular are extremely shareable and it is easy for one website to see the content on another publication and take it for themselves

So, the only difference is the type of marketing collateral and channel? Then, the difference you're describing is a change of tactics -- and the overall strategy remains the same. The strategy is one or more of the following (as I described in my Moz post on integrating traditional and digital marketing): direct marketing, advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, and publicity.

At a prior agency at which I worked, we had a client get massive publicity after we compiled some internal data of theirs into an infographic that got covered in the major media. That was a publicity campaign, not "content marketing."

We never call anything that’s good “content.” Nobody walks out of a movie they loved and says, “Wow! What great content!” Nobody listens to “content” on their way to work in the morning. Do you think anybody ever called Ernest Hemingway a “content creator”? If they did, I bet he would punch ‘em in the nose.

If Moz publishes a post of mine, I take pride on the fact that it was (hopefully!) a great contributed article (or by-lined article, if you want to use the traditional PR term). It is not "content." I've got an idea for a creative campaign for my company involving an original, funny photoshoot. If I seed it on social media and it spreads organically, then that is a great publicity campaign (as per the definition of the term). It is not "content marketing" or "social media marketing." If I pay to have the campaign spread on social media, then it is an advertising campaign (as per the definition of the term).

Whether it's in marketing or in life, every generation thinks that it is doing something completely original and awesome and new. (Or it's a company that is trying to pretend like it's doing or advocating for something new in order to sell something.)

And it's almost never the case. There's nothing new under the digital sun. Whenever people use new buzzwords such as "inbound marketing" or "content marketing" or "social media marketing" or "outreach" or whatever, they are almost always referring to one of the five practices within the marketing promotion mix that have been done for generations as per the definitions of those terms.

TL; DR: Content marketing, for me, means both creation and promotion of advertising collateral including images, text and video. That is not summed up by the word "publicity" which only covers promotion" nor by the phrase "content creation." Therefore, it's an umbrella term: "content marketing" (ie. create content, market it.)

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"Content marketing" is only used as a phrase now because "Advertising for Collateral Marketing" was too long. Actually, let me ask you this: what do you call the "creation, distribution & promotion of images, text, videos and advertising collateral materials"?

Seriously, I agree with almost 100% of what you're saying. Your post says the 5 elements to the promotion mix are: direct marketing, sales promotion, personal selling, advertising, and publicity.

* Direct marketing is not about the content, it's about the method of contact. Direct connections with certain potential buyers/customers. So writing a blog post about my new microphone isn't direct marketing unless I specifically promote it that way.

* Advertising almost 100% of the time means "paid" marketing. What I do when I place an infographic or create a how-to video is never paid media. So it's not advertising.

* Personal selling has nothing to do with content.

* Sales promotion is all about the incentive or discount. Nothing to do with how that message is communicated.

* Publicity is obviously the closest thing we have to a term for content marketing. But your original post says this is getting attention "via the media."

The terms we use should have unique meaning. When someone says they're a publicist on LinkedIn, I don't think even .1% would consider themselves SEO link builders. They mean they direct the mass news media to a subject of interest.

Publicity doesn't really have anything to do with the creation of the content but that's a major part of what we do in 2016. We create collateral for products & services to then be publicized.

This isn't at all what I mean when I use the phrase content marketing. I mean creating content: videos, infographics, images, text, PDFs, ebooks, slideshows & presentations, etc. that are then put through the promotion mix. It's a general term that (at least to me) would mean "creating AND promoting" content.

(Tom, by the way, congratulations on getting promoted to the Moz Blog!)

* Direct marketing is not about the content, it's about the method of contact.

E-mail marketing is direct marketing over the channel of e-mail, so e-mail newsletters are marketing collateral (or content or whatever).

* Personal selling has nothing to do with content.

It certainly has everything to do with content. My company's cofounders give conference presentations and webinars all the time -- and that's personal selling. The slide decks and webinar videos are marketing collateral (or content or whatever).

* Sales promotion is all about the incentive or discount. Nothing to do with how that message is communicated.

It also has to do with how it's communicated. The sales promotion is going to be communicated through a landing page or SMS or coupon or whatever. All of that is marketing collateral (or content or whatever).

Nutshell: "Content" is just that into which a marketing message is placed and which is then transmitted over a communications channel to an audience. It can be an e-mail newsletter, an SMS, a TV advertisement, a coupon, or almost anything else.

That's why "content marketing" is a meaningless word (at least to me). All marketing campaigns transmit "content," so that phrase does not mean anything special or specific.

* Publicity is obviously the closest thing we have to a term for content marketing. But your original post says this is getting attention "via the media."

Exactly -- and here's the thing. Today, we have earned and owned media. So, if a marketing campaign spreads over social media after getting seeded in my company's owned social accounts, then that's also publicity as per the definition because it's still occurring over the media.

As I listed in my Moz post linked earlier in this thread, here's the overall process yesterday and today:

1. Decide on the strategy within the 4 Ps2. Select the weights between the elements of the Promotion Mix3. Choose the channels (online and/or offline) you will use each for any direct selling, advertising, publicity, personal selling, and sales promotions that you will do4. Create the marketing collateral for those campaigns5. Transmit the marketing collateral over the selected channel6. Analyze the results

Samuel - all great points and I do I agree that at the heart of it there isn't necessarily a new core approach from the days before the internet. However, the web has obviously changed things when you dig into the detail and what I tried to do with the post here was share some of the actions which I'd found to be really successful that would hopefully help the Moz readers take away some actionable advice and put into practice for themselves. Whether we call that content marketing, a publicity campaign or anything else is maybe a conversation for a whole new post, but I'd rather focus here on the actions that can help move someone's website/business forward rather than how we define them.

Whether we call that content marketing, a publicity campaign or anything else is maybe a conversation for a whole new post, but I'd rather focus here on the actions that can help move someone's website/business forward rather than how we define them.

I certainly agree that end the end, we're all trying to help each other to become marketers regardless of how we define terms. (And I'm a bit pedantic about facts and word choices as a result of being a reporter in my first career.)

But I think it's a crucial conversation to have. If one produces something that is actually an advertisement, then it's better to look into advertising best practices (which have almost 100 years of experience behind them) rather than read about "content marketing." If one is doing something that is actually a publicity campaign, then it's better to look into best publicity practices (which also have more than 100 years of experience behind them) rather than read about "social media marketing."

By defining our terms at the beginning, we can learn more quickly and market much more effectively later.

Say that you're a publicist who has been doing publicity for years. Then, one day, you see someone selling a new service called "content marketing" that is actually the exact same thing that you had been doing all along. How would you feel?

It's disrespectful at best and disingenuous at worst. But if "content marketers" would admit that they're just selling publicity services, then everyone would hire publicists and "content marketers" would be out of jobs and the Content Marketing Institute would not sell any tickets or magazine subscriptions.

Sam - my experience from working at and with PR agencies/publicists is that even when they are doing digital activity their reporting often does not dig into the depths of links acquired, ranking impact and other elements that as SEOs we see as an integral part of the work. Instead it is on fluffier, less tangible things like circulation metrics or ad value equivalents. Whilst the approach may be similar, the full service of the work, delivery and reporting can be vastly different. I don't think it's disrespectful to call that package something different to what a publicist does.

Stephen Kenwright wrote an interesting piece recently about the race for SEOs to prove they can do PR and PRs to prove they can do SEO. I think there's an argument to say that content marketing sits at the point in between these two disciplines which both are charging for, rather than belonging to one or the other:

I wouldn't say I work as a content marketer - because day to day I don't create anything (apart from wild speculation on the internet) - and I wouldn't say I work in PR - because day to day I don't promote the things that my agency has created (apart from a few shares on social).

By way of explanation of the post you linked to - and for Samuel's benefit - "content" is what my Search agency creates and "PR" is what my Search agency uses to promote our content (and get links).

When a client engages us for PR we make full use of the content team (designers, developers, writers, even data analysts) otherwise we won't have anything newsworthy to take to the public. When a client asks us for content marketing we make full use of our PR team otherwise nobody will see it.

When a client engages us for SEO we use both of these teams (and several others) because we can't do SEO without people who make stuff and people who promote stuff.

I don't see any harm in conforming to the semantics because I think it's going to be just as hard to sell the idea of PR specialists creating instead of designers, developers and writers as it is to sell the idea of SEO specialists building links in 2016.

What I would say is that regardless of whether a client comes to us for PR, content or SEO, the metrics we are measured on are largely the same - and always amount to revenue. So I would focus on talking to clients who want more money instead of talking to clients who want PR or content marketing.

"content" is what my Search agency creates and "PR" is what my Search agency uses to promote our content (and get links).

Well, in my opinion, your entire operation is inefficient by having two departments involved in the process.

Just explore what traditional, creative publicists have always done all day long. They create and execute campaigns that comprise both the creation and the publicizing of creatives and marketing collateral. There's no need to reinvent the wheel.

Absolutely agree - reinventing the wheel, as you say, is definitely not our intention.

But if you've managed to find an entire team of PR specialists who can manipulate data, wireframe and storyboard, design, film, code and test then I'm envious. People like that are extremely rare.

We have ambitions to be a much bigger team (currently we're 70) and to do that we have to play people to their strengths. Some people are better at selling in stories; some people are better at creating tools and videos. We definitely have a few people who could do the job from start to finish but by making sure people are focused on what they're good at I believe we get better work. You're absolutely right that it's a trade off against cost efficiencies.

Having said that, if the same people in your team are doing all of the above it must take you an age to deliver each campaign (assuming you are doing it properly). How do you manage to stay reactive?

my experience from working at and with PR agencies/publicists is that even when they are doing digital activity their reporting often does not dig into the depths of links acquired, ranking impact and other elements that as SEOs we see as an integral part of the work.

So, here's what you're saying:

Publicists -- great at getting exposure but less good at reporting and analyzing metrics

SEOs / content marketers -- less good at getting exposure but better at reporting and analyzing metrics

@Sam Try not to be too precious about it. Content Marketing is the evolution of a basic marketing principle and new methods of distribution are coming about all the time. If everything stayed the same our work would be stale and monotonous. Accept that the industry is evolving and go with the flow.

Call it what you will, the above article demonstrates good marketing execution.

This is a 'poteto potato -tometo tomato' kind of argument. Who cares what we call it among ourselves as long as it works and it adds value to our customers and potential customers. Us marketers have been renaming processes to fit our methodologies forever!

It's certainly not a "potato-potahto" argument. First, there is the ethical issue about renaming a practice that already exists in another industry for the benefit of one's own industry (see my comment in this thread here).

But it also comes down to the issue of "as long as it works."

I guarantee all Mozzers this: If you study the theories and best practices in publicity that have been honed for the last one hundred years, you'll be ten or a hundred times more successful than if you read all the latest blog posts on "content marketing."

When I get e-mails with pitches for one thing or another, I can tell in three seconds whether it came from a publicist or a "content marketer." Guess which ones always go in the trash.

Forget the technicalities, jargons, terminologies, and politics of who owns which processes. I am coming to you from a customer -centric angle. Does it really matter to the customer what we call it among ourselves? No - all that matters is what they receive in their inbox or read online helps them with their pain issues. Marketing is easy; marketeers complicate it. You can quote me on that.

Content marketing takes many forms. And while we might disagree on those forms, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it's aim is worthwhile and the tactics used cab be very similar to those used in similar fields.

Link earning is a laudable goal, one that I wish more folks cottoned to. However, there is nothing inherently wrong with being deliberate about attaining links. As a matter of fact, I've seen all too many times that brands who take on "the links will come" mindset typically see far fewer links overall. At the very least, the deliberate links camp is training themselves to better spot optimal link opportunities.

Ronell, thanks for the comment -- but I think we're approaching the issue in two different ways. If you recall my lengthy Moz post on integrating traditional and digital marketing, you'll remember that I defined the five marketing strategies that have always existed under the Promotion part of the 4 Ps.

If you read those definitions, you will see that anything and everything that is shown as an example of "content marketing" is doing one of those five strategies by another name. And since those five elements came decades before the phrase "content marketing" ever existed, the only logical course of action is to say the "content marketing" is just a new word for something that already existed.

I often see great PR campaigns from travel companies which yield zero links.

As a matter of fact, I've seen all too many times that brands who take on "the links will come" mindset typically see far fewer links overall. At the very least, the deliberate links camp is training themselves to better spot optimal link opportunities.

I certainly agree that taking a "links will come" approach sometimes leads to mentions without links. And you know what? I'm actually cool with that. I'm playing a long game rather than trying to get quick boosts in the SERPs.

When my company officially launched a few months ago, we got some good coverage -- but some of it didn't include links. Still, when I looked in Google Webmaster Tools (er, Google Search Console), I saw a huge spike in the number of organic searches (and then clicks) for my company's brand name. And I'm fine with that result.

What links will come will come as you grow a brand and Google recognizes that. I'm increasingly hesitant to do anything that might even come across as a tiny bit artificial.

Wow! What a thread in here! I had enjoyed the post, not just for the idea and exposition themselves but also how the stages of the creative process are depicted. However, I've enjoyed (and learned!) even more with the discussion on this thread.

I would totally agree with you Samuel - and totally disagree at the same time...

Link building is a two-step process. First: think how do I get publicity? Exactly what you're saying. What can I do to be newsworthy? How can I get covered in the press?

Second: what can I add to this story to make it "linkworthy"? I don't just need a journo to cover what I've done, but I need them to link back to me as well.

For me, you get coverage by making a journalist's life as easy as possible and giving them something awesome. You get links by giving the journalist something that they can give to their audience on top of that news story.

For me, you get coverage by making a journalist's life as easy as possible and giving them something awesome. You get links by giving the journalist something that they can give to their audience on top of that news story.

Well, yeah. But what you describe is simply what publicists have always done. I see no original, additional, added value from what has been described as "content marketing."

Well done! When I read the title of this post I was fearful that it was going to be all about how you got guest posts published all over the place which seems to be the main link building tactic that most travel sites use these days. It's so nice to see a site earn editorial links like this.

Such a great example of content marketing. As i always say touch people emotion attach to their favorite brands, products that will make them to read it and it will go viral like this. I am sure the fruit is not going to be end for this sort of work. We must needs to be a milestone ahead. Good Work. Thanks for sharing it.

It's indeed a great thinking and creativity that you applied. And yes, content production and promoting it in the right place at the right time is equally important. We need this kind of case studies for every field. I am really impressed with your task.Thank you for showing up it here. :)

The discussion on top was so informative! I love reading different opinions of professionals like you, and as al old teacher of mine once said: "the truth itself doesn't exists. Just grab different oppinions and make your own truth." So yeah, I think both content marketing is something new, but as something new it always come from old ideas... Everything new comes from something old, but not for that is not new! :) Congrats on the post!

Thanks for sharing this article. Very creative, inspiring and impressive way to "gain the attention of the masses" using Game of Thrones and linking it to a travel company. Shows you the possibilities really are endless :)

Hey Tom, I just read your article; really really well explained, and the real basic of publicity. The creative idea is the core, but not only, without a clear strategy and a structured media (Marketing) planning! For me, the first distribution of the content is really important.

Much happiness to see good links and you are happy with the service offered,please contact me if you want to purchase more, I have many new blogs with good PR and follow link for your perusal pleasure. This is good avert for MGL.

Hey Tom,This was one of the most useful articles on content strategy I've read in a while. Been sitting in my bookmark section and I'm glad I finally freed some time out of my schedule to give it a comprehensive read.

One of my websites is a travel guide for a small Eastern European country. Already have an idea on how to replicate what you guys did! Then perhaps another one for my fitness oriented site as well. The moment I complete either one, you are the first person to know. Thanks a lot!

You really did a Great job to acquire links and driving traffic towards the website. You have used the traditional content marketing strategy in a very polished way, according to me the major role player in your strategy was trending topic "The Game of Throne" and used it very optimally. The case study will surely help us to work out a content marketing strategy for other industries as well.

Philosophical question I've had for some time: Does Google *want* to count these links as an endorsement of the product/money pages? I'm sure they will but if they manually made a decision on every link surely they would say that just because you have good content on Game of Thrones locations, that doesn't mean you should rank for your product, as that's not directly related.

I believe that if your site is getting links from highly authoritative sites then it is a signal that your site/brand is trustworthy enough to link to and therefore not doing anything blatantly untoward. If the graphic was from a spammy looking site which had lots of negative signals (pop ups, slow site speed, dodgy ads etc) I don't think half the number of sites would have featured it and linked to it, especially the larger publications where it initially featured. If that's the case then I think it's fair to assume that the level of trust a site has to link to someone would transfer to the service/product they offer too.

You could extend your question to blog posts in general, which are often the recipients of many sites' links. Just because someone produces good content on their blog which people link to doesn't necessarily mean it is a thumbs up for their product/service.

I don't think Google can accurately differentiate these things sufficiently to not give links like this significant value. There are certainly elements it will take into account and may use to give a link more ranking weight (title tag/content of linking page etc) but I don't think they would discount a link entirely, just because the page it is being linked from isn't 100% on topic.

I'm seeing more and more sites ranking well off the back of just a few links on higher authority sites, as opposed to lots of links on middle/lower level sites. Therefore I think it's important that you use all possible avenues to get featured in these places, whether that be through the kind of approach highlighted here, more traditional PR or other publicity campaigns...

No doubt Google will turn around in 6 months and start favouring comment and forum links, but until then I think this kind of approach will be very effective.

Great question! Whilst the same graphic is being used on these sites, the text content around them is totally unique and written by the sites who pick it up. The only duplication is the content in the image which is not crawlable by search engines. Therefore no duplicate content issues!

That's great! I can't see any uplift in visibility for the site via Search Metrics. Did you guys find that the organic traffic and conversions increased following your work? Did the links actually help in rankings and visibility?

Unfortunately the site was battling some other demons which made the subsequent ranking and traffic improvement unrepresentative which is why I didn't include much detail on it in the post. However, for other similar campaigns we've run we have definitely seen a significant uplift in both rankings and traffic following this kind of coverage.

"Once you have your exclusive feature in place, the next action is to publish it on your own site."

Wouldn't you want to have it published on your site first so that they can link to the exact article as the source? If you're getting links before the content is published on your own site are they just linking to your homepage as the source (generically) even though you don't have anything on your site yet?

Do you go back to those publications and tell them the link updated after the fact?

We've found that offering the content as an exclusive to another site often increases the chances of them taking it on, as opposed to publishing it on our site and then telling them about it.

This does result in a link to the homepage initially rather than the content itself (as in the example above), but if you get the content live on your own site quickly enough after that then subsequent people who pick it up will usually head to your site and link to the page where the content appears - just make sure it's sufficiently prominent on your homepage!

In this instance we didn't chase people to update links to the content itself, though in some cases (e.g. when you're trying to rank that page for something) that might be something we would do.

Tom, this almost word for word sums up the approach which we use for clients. The only difference for us, as mentioned above, is that publishing on the clients site would always be the first thing we'd do...to allow somewhere to link to.

Great piece and can relate very well to it.

It really does all come down to the idea and I often take the approach of taking a look at what else people have covered in the past month. That's by no means to say copy their idea but by knowing whats getting coverage you can make an educated decision as to the right idea and almost know ahead of time how well it'll be received.

Awesome post I ma working for a travel site, we established site.. I will implement all these things to improve my back-links & traffic on my sites... :)....Really love the ideas shared here awesome posts and well optimized easily understandable content.....

Tom - great post. I have a travel client and know how hard it is to promote content well since there's so much competition.

Have you had any luck with travel bloggers? I feel like I'm dealing with the mafia as they all want payment for a sponsored post. Good for them as they aim to make a living traveling the world, but I've found it disheartening as a marketer.

Have you run into the same, which is why you seemed to focus on big media outlets instead for this?

I'm not Tom, but I'd venture a guess that a mass audience is suitable for his company. Everyone travels, so it can be useful to target mass outlets that everyone reads. It's not always best to target very niche websites.

Yes, they can be a demanding bunch! Unfortunately I think the SEO industry has made a rod for their own back as such a large proportion have opted for the easy/spammy approach of sending mass emails to bloggers asking for 'guest posts' and it has led to bloggers becoming very aware of their value and how much money they can make from the sponsored post approach. A side product of this is that they don't want to feature companies in any shape or form as they don't want to 'giveaway' a link to a company who may pay them for an advert/sponsored post at some point in the future.

As they are normally independent bloggers running their own personal sites, they don't have too much pressure from an editorial perspective to churn out content on large scale, whereas the writers for the bigger media outlets do, so are much more receptive if you can come up with good stories/content for them to feature.

I'm a bit confused why the client website is still so far down the serps (bottom of page 3 for 'Moroccan holidays') after gaining all those links? If they were already under some kind of penalty wasn't it a waste of time putting in all that effort to get those links? After all, the publicity generated is going to be very short lived (and I doubt much of the traffic converted into sales).

Also, as a further thought, what was the risk of tripping an unatural links filter/penalty with such a sudden increase.

Unfortunately the site had a lot of duplication issues which were being resolved and as we know Google doesn't like to address issues like these as soon as they are fixed!

Whilst it's taking some time for these changes to be acknowledged, I don't think it's a wasted effort, those links will still be there when they are overcome and the site will benefit from them. It also provided some great visibility for the brand in the meantime and has set it up nicely for future improvements.

I also don't see any risk of suffering from an unnatural links penalty as these are all natural, editorial links on high quality sites. It is the same as a site running an advertising or PR campaign that will see an influx of links as a result, or a blog post going viral and getting shared and linked to in lots of places.

Also "Moroccan holidays" is an immensely competitive search term and the top several pages of websites invest huge amounts of money into links, sure, as well as UX, generating reviews, building their brand on TV and in the press etc.

Also if the site were suffering from a penalty (especially algorithmic) I would definitely be investing in building awesome links otherwise you'll remove the penalty and never recover anywhere close to where you were. Think Tom has taken exactly the right strategy here.

I agree, definitely a highly competitive search term (with mainly big guns in there) and would be difficult to crack regardless of the health of a site. I was always under the impression though that once a site picks up certain penalties, it sometimes never fully recovers no matter what you do, and a clean start with a new domain might be a better bet. Is that still a grey area?

I would say it depends on the severity of the penalty. If someone has been consistently getting spammy links for many years which can't be removed then there is certainly an argument for starting a fresh. If you haven't been too naughty I would say it's realistic to get rid of the bad links you've acquired and have a good chance of full recovery. Of course, it also depends on what good stuff you've done - if you have lots of links from press and 'authority' sites then you are more likely to try and clean up bad links and stick with your main site, if all you have is bad links then it's a more straightforward choice to start a fresh.

In this instance the issues were on-site, not link related so it was a more straightforward job to put right

Great idea, and cool way to convert it into "content marketing" and use it as a campaign. The good part i learnt is that everyone may use a good idea even if it has not too much in common with the product. The hard part is to find a really good idea :) Congratulations!

Thank you, Tom. This post will probably help many SEO friends out there, but it is, in my opinion, too much of the same.

I love SEO. I have done SEO for many years, and I usually work with companies which operate in very competitive and highly regulated markets.

What we realized after years of acting in these impossibly competitive environments, is that the type of content, publishing sequences, amplification techniques and title relevance are more important than the actual links the site gets. The question that interests me is what the impact of the suggested content-marketing strategy would be on the cost of client acquisition. As well, how sustainable and expandable could it be?

In terms of the impact on cost per acquisition, obviously this kind of activity can't be looked at in isolation around the period when the content is published. The benefit of it is much longer term than that - if going through this process acquires a significant number of links on powerful sites that help take key rankings on to page 1 for commercial keywords then you are likely to see fantastic value for money as you will be reaping the rewards weeks, months and years into the future. Links are crucial to achieving this long term effect.

Of course, it's different for every site depending on their starting position - if you are a brand new site then the first piece of content you create might not take any rankings on to page 1 or significantly increase search engine traffic, but it will move you forward and closer to that goal. You then have to replicate the process a few more times (amongst your other marketing activity) and eventually it will lead to improved rankings and traffic and help you break on to page 1 for more and more of your key phrases, as well as increasing longtail traffic. Conversions can then come consistently off the back of the position you have established.

We all know SEO is not a short term game, but if you carry out the right kind of activity in the first instance then it can bring significant long term, sustainable results and a very nice CPA.